South Africa’s Political Fires

CAPE TOWN — Many a political obituary has been written for South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma. Even as he began his second term last week in the Union Buildings, there were murmurs that he might not see it through, owing to the multitude of fires — many of them perilously close to home — that he’ll need to put out.

The first of these is a damning report prepared by the public protector, Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s equivalent of an ombudsman or inspector general. The report found that Mr. Zuma had benefited unduly from a $22 million project to upgrade his private home in rural KwaZulu-Natal Province and that his administration’s profligacy and lack of oversight caused the project’s cost to quadruple. Last week, a press officer for the president announced that Mr. Zuma’s security ministers would challenge the report in court on the grounds that Ms. Madonsela had acted beyond her constitutional powers.

Mr. Zuma has been keen to quash the report because opposition parties are using it to drive a wedge between him and the rest of his party — the African National Congress. And pressure from the party’s rank and file could eventually push him out of office — as was the fate of former President Thabo Mbeki.

Next on his agenda is halting the fracturing and collapse of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Cosatu is a powerful federation of workers with about two million members. It has also historically been, along with the Communist Party, a key segment of the “tripartite alliance” that makes up the A.N.C. and has therefore toed the party line.

In the wake of the massacre at the Marikana mine in 2012, the federation’s leadership had a public falling out over whether its longstanding alliance with the A.N.C. remains beneficial to workers and the poor. The vocal and militant metal worker’s union, known as Numsa, doesn’t think so, and, supported by eight other unions, it has begun exploring the possibility of forming a worker’s party to contest the 2016 municipal elections and eventually the national elections in 2019.

Although several political parties have formed from splinters of the A.N.C. alliance — the most recent of which, the Economic Freedom Fighters, earned a respectable 6 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections earlier this month — none have done lasting damage to the A.N.C. However, if Cosatu fractures and its metal workers succeed in forming a party, it has the potential to seriously erode the A.N.C.’s support among municipal and mine workers, and in other poor communities.

And there are two commissions of inquiry — one on the Marikana massacre and another on the government’s acquisition of strategic military equipment in 1999 — whose outcomes could have a significant impact on the political futures, or legacies, of senior A.N.C. figures. Both commissions, however, have been dogged by accusations of being elaborate cover-ups to protect the party and its bigwigs.

Finally, there is a bid by the Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, to obtain the record of the decision by state prosecutors to drop corruption charges against Mr. Zuma in 2009, a month before he was first elected president.

Mr. Zuma has been forced to engage in a series of appeals and Byzantine legal maneuvers because it’s becoming clearer that the decision in 2009 to drop the charges might not stand up to judicial review, which could clear the way for Mr. Zuma to be charged again.

But if Mr. Zuma’s political career thus far has shown anything, it’s that he has the uncanny ability to emerge unscathed and often stronger after scandals that would have destroyed a less wily politician. Since assuming the party’s leadership in 2007, two years before he became president, he has perfected the illusion of ceding control of his presidency to the party’s national executive committee, a central decision-making body comprised of elected senior party members. That way, the entire party is on the hook for whatever occurs on his watch, blurring the line between party and state.

But Mr. Zuma has in fact ceded hardly any power. While the members of the executive committee may publicly declare that no individual is above the organization, a significant number of them belong to a faction of the party that’s loyal to Mr. Zuma, and their political futures are contingent on his fate. To protect themselves, they are likely to direct the organization and the state to protect him.

As a result, Mr. Zuma will probably complete his second term and retire to a lifetime presidential pension. But with so many fires to put out, he won’t have any time to deal with the real challenges facing the country — a yawning gap between rich and poor, stratospheric levels of unemployment and millions working for less than what’s required to provide for their basic needs. And that failure will be his legacy.

T. O. Molefeis an essayist, at work on a book on post-apartheid race relations.